Academic Libraries and the Economics of Scholarly Publishing in the Twenty-First Century: Portfolio Theory, Product Differentiation, Economic Rent, Perfect Price Discrimination, and the Cost of Prestige
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last five decades, a great deal has been written about the ‘serials crisis,’ library budget shortfalls, the growth of various commercial scholarly publishers, the response from various academic library associations to the serials crisis, and the emergence of open access publications. Yet very little has been written about the economics of scholarly publishing. In this article, the growth of universities and the academic community's never-ending need for prestigious scholarly publications are explored, along with substantive economic theories used by scholarly publishers, including portfolio theory, product differentiation, economic rent, and perfect price discrimination. A series of recommendations are made to ameliorate the ‘clash’ between academia and the scholarly publishing community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.035 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.111 | 0.236 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it